phrases that make me stop to ponder the universe and my place in it....

'people are smart....' the opening line from a ditech commercial. yep, and they prove how smart they are every election.

'starring tara reid.' oh, man, if there was ever a definition of 'red flag'....

'oops, she did it again.' nice hair extentions Brillo, er, Britney. say, where'd you learn those VMA moves at, watching kids' tv programming? difference is those kids, who, judging by their uncoordinated flailings, should really be on some kind of medication, show signs of life.

'yours free with purchase of $500 or more.' free? really? wow! i think i'll start shopping at wal*mart, too, because, you know, i don't know how to clip a coupon. and you're saying all i have to do is spend a ton of money to get something free whose price you've worked into the overall price?

'instructions included.' nah, don't need 'em, thanks anyway. i routinely assemble gas grills and popcorn machines.

'void in south carolina.' yeah, i can see that. makes sense. damn south carolinianers, who do they think they are, expecting the same deal *i'm* getting in ohio?

'call within the next fifteen minutes to receive....' whew, i'm glad to see that operators are standing by with commecials schedules and stopwatches. i *totally* believe this happens.

'cheese-flavored.' thank gawd it's not real cheese, but some chemical concoction the army germ warfare division stumbled on. at least lactose intolerant folk can taste cheese, even if it's not real.

'pregnant or lactating women should consult a doctor before using any product.' any product? really? so, these dietary supplements could kill?

'results may vary.' thank gawd Captain Obvious is on patrol today.

'restrictions apply.' mind telling me more about these restrictions in something other than microscopic print?

'for external use only.' damnit, then why do you make windex taste so good?

'news you can use.' yes, i need to know what the dew point is so i can apply that to my knowledge of the accident on the highway today. there's *got* to be a connection!

'side effects include blah blah blah, but most cases are generally mild.' the hemmorhoid (sp) medication i took cased me to squirt blood from my eyes, but it was just a mild expulsion, so i'm good. i tried that stuff that's supposed to cure stigmata, but now i hear voices, but that's okay because they sing songs i like.

'does not prevent the spread of venereal disease.' this is why i always buy crunchy instead of smooth.

i'd thought about the viagra warning. then i happened across a commercial for vinestra (?), which is supposed to give guys hard ons when they suffer from ED from high blood pressure or diabetes, etc.. at the end it cuts to a giant green (i.e. fertile) field of rolling high with a million middle-aged, rugged-looking men (they have to be a man's man down to the last to avoid the impression that you're a wimp for having ED because, you know, our egos are so delicate. trust me, if i couldn't get an erection, you guys would be the first to know) staring into the camera.

this is kind of an aside, i guess, but if you think about, really pay attention to the way these commercials are constructed, as if straight out of the nazi propaganda handbook.

my all-time favourite is about a pill for women who're suffering from a bit of malaise. here's the idea: 'take our pill and be happy again.' nothing new. women have been doing this for years, anyway. so there's this woman, maybe in her mid-thirties, not old but old enough to be driven to the brink of despair. it starts off with some commentary about sex, her in the foreground sulking around because she's never in the mood, her husband sitting forlorn on the bed in the background, no doubt thinking about screwing his friend's wife next time biff has to go on a business trip.

there's some talk about what the pill will do for her, then suddenly she's literally jumping up and down in bed like a crazy person, her husband, still sitting in bed, ducking to the side thinking, 'crazy bitch!' but, it's okay because he knows he'll be getting laid soon. what the women watching the commercial don't realize is that he's still going to nail biff's wife because at least she's not chemically imbalanced.

i watched a new commercial last night about autism, of all things. it started off with mom strapping her baby into a carseat and the narrator saying, 'there's a 1 in 23,000 chance that your baby will be involved in a fatal car accident,' or words to that effect. and from there i didn't understand the commercial or trust in it. 1 in 23,000? what does that mean? that one baby dies in every 23,000 fatal car accidents? or one baby dies in every 23,000 car accidents that involves a fatality when there's a baby on board?

then it says, by vast contrast, that one in every 166 babies are born autistic. what?! surely that can't be right, one in every 166? that said, those babies grow up to be adults, so one in every 166 adults has autism? i don't know about you, but that sounds ridiculously high. good gravy, that's a rampant epidemic! that's probably more than people with aids and terminal cancer combined. what the hell are we having telethons for MD for, jerry?

then there are those 'truth' commercials about smoking that uses every cheap gimmick in the book to spout everything but the truth. invariably it's a bunch of hip college-age kids on a crusade. what they don't show you is those kids binge drinking and eating at burger king, which will give you more heart problems sooner than if you smoked a pack a day for sixty years. they don't want to tell you everyone has cancer cells, they want to tell you that you will die as a direct result of smoking, which automatically triggers those cells, eh? wrong. then they'll 'die' en masse on the street in front of a cigarette headquarters and show a number like '1,500 people die every day from smoking.' i don't know how many people die every day in america, another fact they don't bother mentioning probably because they don't know or it would interfer with their statistics, such as they are, nor do they say what the average age of these people are. in fact they don't say anything other than cigarettes kill x amount of people per day. i'm sure it does: i'm also sure a lot of things kill x amount of people per day. it's the 'truth' as long as someone wants to believe it and doesn't care to ask a single follow-up question, such as 'where do you get your facts from?' statistics can be skewed, after all, and that's the one real fact you can believe in.

the point is it's hilarious to watch how these ads are made. brilliant in part, and completely tacky and tasteless at the same time. even the names of these pills are awful, typically a combination of life-affirming words jammed together (i read an article once on naming these pills, and i think an average fifth-grader could arrive at the same obvious names. rule number one: try to end with an 'a'. honestly, pay attention to how many of these things end with 'a').

then you've got your commercials about 'companies that care.' bullshit. they don't care 'bout nothin'. chase banks shows me they care by posters at the bank of a nine-month pregnant woman in her baby's room, soft sunlight filtering in, and she's freakin' writing a check out using her bulge as a desk! disgusting. or GM showing a car driving along a winding mountain road while acoustic music is playing. or fifth-third bank's radio spot with my all-time favourite jim croce song playing in the background. yeah, i'm sure jim croce had in mind to use his song to hawk a bank when he wrote 'and i'm going to go there free.' conveniently the ad-men left out the part of the song that goes, 'like the fool i am and i'll always be.' slick, slimy and disgusting, but brilliant. i like to shit a brick the first time i heard a led zeppelin song for a car ad. not to mention a john lennon song.

'freedom', if you believe the ads, involves being in tight with your bank and taking the right pills that end with a soft, soothing vowell. that, my friends, is news you can use.

(yes, yes, i was born to be in propaganda. my porn career got in the way, though. hm, maybe 'pornaganda' is my true calling?)

it's funny: i used to work at GM/delphi. the management *and* union lied to us so often that we never knew when they were telling the truth. it was like that peter and the wolf story, except it wasn't peter whose life was on the line, rather some twilight zone ironic twist.

so autism is on the rise, eh? lol. well, not 'lol', you know what i mean. it goes from 166 to 150 just like that. can't trust anyone these daze.

years ago, there was a doctor who was in charge of the national highway safety board (or something like that, i can't remember exactly). he was extremely opposed to raising the speed limit, then trotted out all sorts of statistics proving that higher speeds resulted in more fatalities. true, higher speeds cause more deaths... when you actually crash ~ it's called physics. the argument was that cars (at the time of the debate, 'round 15 years back or so) are a lot safer, reducing the number. so this doctor used statistics based on drunk drivers getting into accidents and calling it speed related instead of alcohol related. certainly those same statistics were used for both speed and alcohol related crusades. (consequently, high accident highways implemented a higher speed limit as an experiment and the fatality rate dropped dramatically.) but the doctor reminded people the reason for the national speed limit was 'fifty-five saves lives.' again, duh. in truth, that slogan appeared in reaction to the oil embargos of the 70's as a fuel saving measure. were it about saving lives, the gov't would have made airbags, having been around since the 60's, mandatory, eh? (btw, in case anyone is interested, germany's autobahn has a fatality rate per million mile driven much lower than america's. difference is they don't hand out drivers licenses like candy out over there. and contrary to popular belief, the autobahn *does* have speed limits in certain areas, generally around on-ramps. when i was there (drove from berlin to cologne/koln) there were patches were you could go as fast as you want as long as you went about it in a safe manner. odd, too, was that after having driving over half the country there i saw exactly one car on the side of the road and one instance of road construction. then i returned home and from the airport to home ran into two construction zones and three downed cars on the shoulder. it still feels like the wild west on wheels now, lol.)

i had a high school art teacher who made us spend a week tearing through magazine ads and look for subliminal artwork hidden in ice cubes and smoke and such. interesting. i'm sure they still do this.

from a 'best buy' ad in small print: required minimum monthly payment is greater of (their word, not a mistake on my part) $10 or 1% of balance plus billed finance charges (note: it says elsewhere that plan A is 22.65%, plan B is 25.65%) plus any late fees. ~ this is on 'no interest for 3 years on all home theater and installation totaling $999 & up.' so now i'm thinking, 'is the financing charges the same as interest?' i'm confused. mission accomplished on their part.